Great Neck Plaza trustees approved Wednesday the village’s $6.9 million 2017-18 fiscal year budget, which calls for an approximately 7 percent increase in property taxes.
The budget, which was voted on at Wednesday’s Board of Trustees meeting, calls for $6,997,011 in spending, a nearly 5.6 percent decrease from the $7,411,795 that was approved in the current year’s budget.
Despite the decrease in spending, Great Neck Plaza Mayor Jean Celender said the village was increasing revenues collected from property taxes, from $2,762,075 in 2016-17 to $2,955,851, for roadway and sidewalk repairs.
The village will be piercing the state-mandated .80 percent tax cap. The board passed a resolution at its Jan. 4 meeting allowing it do so.
“We do everything we can to minimize our expenses and to try to leverage them with other available state agencies and federal monies,” Celender said. “However, with the tax cap at less than 1 percent, and having made other reductions in the past years, there reaches a point in which you can’t make more efficiencies.”
The budget calls for $435,500 to be spent on road maintenance and repairs, an increase of $290,000 from the current year’s budget.
Celender said that $125,000 of road maintenance spending will be covered by a state grant the village has been preliminarily awarded. The village is finalizing paperwork to officially receive the funds, she said.
While the decision to increase taxes was not easy, Celender said, she preferred not to increase spending through bonding.
“We don’t typically bond for these because we’re paying it out over a number of years that extend beyond,” she said. “It’s also more expensive when you consider all the financing costs of it.”
“If we put in a couple of hundred thousand now, we’ll be able to have that in there allocated for doing more roads in future years,” Celender added.
She also said that it has been 20 years since some roads have been repaired.
Celender said the the decrease in spending in the budget stems from a number of things, including the near-completed Transportation Enhancement Project at Shoreward Drive and Welwyn Road, which was budgeted for in the current year’s budget, and Nassau County no longer distributing sales tax revenue to other municipalities.
She noted that the village’s budgets have remained under the tax cap for the past four years since it has been mandated by the state, and for the two years before that, the village did not increase its tax rate.
Celender said the average homeowner’s village tax increase is about $45.
